Those Bones Are Not My Child Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Toni Cade Bambara
hall and the police department. Shrewd maneuver on Maynard’s part, for as was/is an open secret in most cities, there are two police departments: a Black police force, comparatively new, having evolved as a result of the civil rights movement; and a white force, not new, and to a great extent pledged to the old order. Many a newly elected Black mayor has found him/herself embattled from day one by the reluctance, frequently bitter, ofttimes fierce, of the old-boy network to honor the voters’ choice.
No one foresaw that Atlanta’s Office of Public Safety would require a big budget, a large staff, a PR director, and a comprehensive body of policies and procedures. Its work had been, under Brown and under his predecessor, Reginald Eaves, of a community relations nature. Until the killers struck.
Eventually, the media began to ask pointed questions about the “conflicts” in the unfolding drama: bad-mouthing between the police and the community; between official investigators and community sleuths and out-of-town visitors armed with hunches; between STOP and organizations self-appointed to raise funds in the parents’ names; between the parents and city officials; between local, state, and federal authorities, who each complained that the other agencies were conducting investigations in secret and obstructing their own investigations.
Many in the targeted neighborhoods were willing to be cast as passive spectators to the tug-of-war scenarios written by reporters. But others, not distracted by theatrics, cast themselves as undercover workers who sorted out the growing roster of characters into major and minor players. From the day the case became national news, the cast of characters kept growing—psychics, suspects, tipsters, bat squads, witnesses, hypnotists, journalists, forensic experts, cult specialists, computer consultants, fund raisers, dog trainers, filmmakers, visitingcelebrities. Hundreds of people with theories, alliances, agenda clotted the arena, which began to take on the look of a fiendish perception test, challenging the most discerning eye to lift out of the dense design those players that could lead them to purposeful action. Those community workers who were not stymied by the cluttered ground design began to chart a particular part of the schemata—the crisscrossing paths of the feds.
Community sleuths clocked federal agents in and out of Atlanta as early as summer 1980. There were feds investigating alleged kidnappings even as the official word to the public and the parents was “runaways.” But other feds, using the Missing and Murdered cases as a cover, were engaged in COINTELPRO-like operations, particularly against the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Central American Support Committee. President Carter, who made no secret of his suspicions and alarm over the dangerously clandestine nature of the intelligence operations, was the one hope clung to by citizens subjected to FBI breakins routinely blamed on burglars. The election of President Reagan, though, changed the picture. Both the intelligence community and right-wing insurgents stepped up their covert activities, overseas and on home ground. And community-based detectives moved further away from the media spotlight in order to keep an eye on the feds.
Agents from the Treasury Department, from the Internal Revenue Service, and from the Securities and Exchange Commission were unusually active in and around Atlanta. Their subject of surveillance was a ring of counterfeiters, credit-card defrauders, junk-bond hucksters, bank robbers, and states’ rights tax protesters that was bankrolling the ultra-right network through criminal activity. Agents from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms crossed their path. The ATF was on the trail of ultra-right gangs that were knocking over armories in the Southeast and stockpiling weapons in and around Atlanta in preparation for race war. ATF agents, in turn, were covering the same ground as narcs,
No one foresaw that Atlanta’s Office of Public Safety would require a big budget, a large staff, a PR director, and a comprehensive body of policies and procedures. Its work had been, under Brown and under his predecessor, Reginald Eaves, of a community relations nature. Until the killers struck.
Eventually, the media began to ask pointed questions about the “conflicts” in the unfolding drama: bad-mouthing between the police and the community; between official investigators and community sleuths and out-of-town visitors armed with hunches; between STOP and organizations self-appointed to raise funds in the parents’ names; between the parents and city officials; between local, state, and federal authorities, who each complained that the other agencies were conducting investigations in secret and obstructing their own investigations.
Many in the targeted neighborhoods were willing to be cast as passive spectators to the tug-of-war scenarios written by reporters. But others, not distracted by theatrics, cast themselves as undercover workers who sorted out the growing roster of characters into major and minor players. From the day the case became national news, the cast of characters kept growing—psychics, suspects, tipsters, bat squads, witnesses, hypnotists, journalists, forensic experts, cult specialists, computer consultants, fund raisers, dog trainers, filmmakers, visitingcelebrities. Hundreds of people with theories, alliances, agenda clotted the arena, which began to take on the look of a fiendish perception test, challenging the most discerning eye to lift out of the dense design those players that could lead them to purposeful action. Those community workers who were not stymied by the cluttered ground design began to chart a particular part of the schemata—the crisscrossing paths of the feds.
Community sleuths clocked federal agents in and out of Atlanta as early as summer 1980. There were feds investigating alleged kidnappings even as the official word to the public and the parents was “runaways.” But other feds, using the Missing and Murdered cases as a cover, were engaged in COINTELPRO-like operations, particularly against the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Central American Support Committee. President Carter, who made no secret of his suspicions and alarm over the dangerously clandestine nature of the intelligence operations, was the one hope clung to by citizens subjected to FBI breakins routinely blamed on burglars. The election of President Reagan, though, changed the picture. Both the intelligence community and right-wing insurgents stepped up their covert activities, overseas and on home ground. And community-based detectives moved further away from the media spotlight in order to keep an eye on the feds.
Agents from the Treasury Department, from the Internal Revenue Service, and from the Securities and Exchange Commission were unusually active in and around Atlanta. Their subject of surveillance was a ring of counterfeiters, credit-card defrauders, junk-bond hucksters, bank robbers, and states’ rights tax protesters that was bankrolling the ultra-right network through criminal activity. Agents from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms crossed their path. The ATF was on the trail of ultra-right gangs that were knocking over armories in the Southeast and stockpiling weapons in and around Atlanta in preparation for race war. ATF agents, in turn, were covering the same ground as narcs,